Assessing health-related quality of life in patients with breast cancer: a reply to Ribi et al.

We have read with great interest Ribi’s et al. reply [1] to our study [2] concerning the assessment of International Breast Cancer Study Group (IBCSG) Quality of Life (QoL) Core Form. However, in Ribi’s reply there are several points we would like to clarify.

Regarding methodological comments about our study [2], the systematic review process was carried out in order to obtain exclusively articles containing information about the development process, psychometric properties, administration and cultural adaptation issues of the instruments. Based on these criteria, any study where health-related quality of life was assessed with the instrument but did not include any specific information about the development process, psychometric properties, administration and cultural adaptation issues were excluded. The reason is that the EMPRO’s aim is not to assess the use of the instrument and its results in individual studies, but rather to measure the attributes above listed. This...

Schmidt, S., & the EMPRO Group. (2014). Assessing quality of life in patients with prostate cancer: A systematic and standardized comparison of available instruments. Quality of Life Research, 23, 2169–2181.CrossRefPubMedPubMedCentralGoogle Scholar